The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

We may, indeed, make out a special case against the Papacy, to the effect that, but for that, Italian intelligence would have had a freer life; and that even if Italy, like Spain and France and England, underwent despotism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, her intellectual activity would have sufficed to work her recovery at least as rapidly as the process took place elsewhere. It has been argued[610] that the liberating force elsewhere in the sixteenth century was the Reformation—a theory which leaves us asking what originated the Reformation in its turn. Taking that to be the spirit of (a) inchoate free thought, of developing reason, or (b) of economic revolt against the fiscal exactions of an alien power, or both, we are entitled to say broadly that the crushing of such revolt in Italy, as in Provence and in Spain, clearly came of the special development of the papal power thus near its centre—the explanation of "national character" being as nugatory in this as in any other sociological issue.

Heeren naturally rests on this solution. The "new religion," he says, "was suited to the north, but not to the south. The calm and investigating spirit of the German nations found in it the nourishment which it required and sought for.... The more vivid imagination and sensitive feelings of the people of the south ... found little to please them in its tenets.... It was not, therefore, owing to the prohibitions of the government, but to the character of the nations themselves, that the Reformation found no support among them" (vol. cited, pp. 58, 59). The two explanations of climate and race can thus be employed alternatively at need. Ireland, though "northern," is to be got rid of as not being "German." For the rest, the Albigenses, the paterini, the reforming Franciscans, and the myriad victims of the Inquisition in Spain, are conveniently ignored. Heeren's phrase about the "almost total exclusion" of the southern countries from the "great ferment of ideas which in other countries of civilised Europe gave activity and life to the human intellect" can be described only as a piece of concentrated misinformation. And a similar judgment must be passed on the summing-up of Mr. Symonds that "Germany achieved the labour of the Reformation almost single-handed" (Renaissance in Italy, 2nd ed. i, 28). There is far more truth in the verdict of Guizot, that "la principale lutte d'érudition et de doctrine contre l'Eglise catholique a été soutenue par la réforme française; c'est en France et en Hollande, et toujours en français, qu'ont été écrits tants d'ouvrages philosophiques, historiques, polémiques, à l'appui de cette cause" (Civilisation en France, i, 18). Motley, though an uncritical Teutophile and Gallophobe, admits as to Holland that "the Reformation first entered the Provinces, not through the Augsburg but the Huguenot gate" (Rise of the Dutch Republic, ed. 1863, p. 162). As to the spirit of reformation in Italy and Spain, the student may consult the two careful and learned Histories of M'Crie, works which might have saved many vain generalisations by later writers, had they heeded them. The question of the supposed racial determination of the Reformation is discussed at some length in The Saxon and the Celt, pp. 92-97, 143-47, 203, 204. Cp. The Dynamics of Religion, 1897, pt. i; Letters on Reasoning, 2nd ed. 1905, pp. 20-24; and A Short History of Freethought, vol. i, chs. ix, x, xi.

The history of Italian religious life shows that the spirit of sheer reformation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was stronger there than even in France in the sixteenth, where again it was perhaps positively stronger than in Germany, though not stronger relatively to the resistance. And in Italy the resistance was personified in the Papacy, which there had its seat and strength. When all is said, however, the facts remain that in England the Reformation meant sordid spoliation, retrogression in culture, and finally civil war; that in France it meant long periods of furious strife; that in Germany, where it "prospered," it meant finally a whole generation of the most ruinous warfare the modern world had seen, throwing back German civilisation a full hundred years. Save for the original agony of conquest and the special sting of subjection to alien rule, Italy suffered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries less evils than these.

The lesson of our retrospect, then, is: (1) generally, that as between medieval Italian development and that of other countries—say our own—there has been difference, not of "race character" and "faculty," but of favouring and adverse conditions; and (2) particularly, that certain social evils which went on worsening in Florence and are in some degree present in all societies to-day, call for scientific treatment lest they go on worsening with us. The modern problem is in many respects different from that of pre-Reformation Italy; but the forces concerned are kindred, and it may be worth while to note the broad facts of the past process with some particularity.

§ 2

The central fact of disunion in Italian life, complicated as we have seen it to be by extraneous factors, analyses down to the eternal conflict of interests of the rich and the poor, the very rich and the less rich, or, as Italian humour figured it, the "fat" and the "lean." For Machiavelli this is the salient trouble in the Florentine retrospect, since it survived the feuds of Guelph and Ghibelline; though he sets down to the Papacy the foreign invasions and the disunion of the cities. The faction-feuds, of course, tell of the psychological conditions of the feud of rich and poor, and were to some extent an early form of the feud,[611] the imperialist Ghibellines being originally the more aristocratic faction; while the papalist Guelphs, by the admission of Machiavelli, were the more friendly to the popular liberties, that being the natural course for the Papacy to take. The imperial cause, on the other hand, was badly compromised by the tyranny of the terrible Ezzelino III, the representative of Frederick II in the Trevisan March, who ruled half-a-dozen cities in a fashion never exceeded for cruelty in the later ages of Italian tyranny.[612] Whatever democratic feeling there was must needs be on the other side.

After Florence had recast its constitution at the death of Frederick II, establishing twelve anziani or magistrates, replaced every two months, and two foreign judges—one the upper-class podestà and the other the captain of the people[613]—to prevent grounds of quarrel, matters were in fair train, and the city approved its unity by the sinister steps of forcing Pistoia, Arezzo, and Siena to join its confederation, capturing Volterra, and destroying several villages, whose inhabitants were deported to Florence. But new plots on behalf of Manfred led to the expulsion of the Ghibellines, who in turn, getting the upper hand with no sense of permanence, reasoned that to make their party safe they must destroy the city; a purpose changed, as the familiar story goes, only by the protest of the Florentine Ghibelline chief, Farinata degli Uberti. They then tried, in obvious bad faith, the expedient of conciliating the people, whom they had always hitherto oppressed, by giving them a quasi-democratic constitution, in which the skilled workers were recognised as bodies, to which all citizens had to belong.[614] But this scheme being accompanied by fresh taxation, the Ghibellines were driven out by force; and once more the Guelphs, now backed by Charles of Anjou (1266), organised a government of twelve magistrates, adding a council of twenty-four upper-class citizens, called the credenza, and yet another body of 180 popular deputies, thirty for each of the six quarters of the city, making up with the others a Council General. To this, however, was strangely added yet another council of 120, charged with executive functions. The purpose was to identify the Guelph cause with that of the people—that is, the lower bourgeoisie and skilled artisans; and the property of the exiled Ghibellines was confiscated and divided among the public treasury, the heads of the ruling party, and the Guelphs in general. At this stage the effort of Gregory X, at his election, to effect a restoration of the Ghibellines and a general reconciliation, naturally failed. Yet when his successor, Nicolas III, persisted in the anti-French policy, he was able through his northern legate to persuade the city, suffering from the lawlessness of the Guelph as of old from that of the Ghibelline nobles, to recall the latter and set up a new constitution of fourteen governors, seven of each party, all nominated by the Pope—a system which lasted ten years. Then came another French interregnum; whereafter, on the fall of the French rule in Sicily in 1282, there was set up yet another constitution of compromise. For the council of fourteen was set up one of three priori delle arti, heads of the crafts—a number immediately raised to six, so as to give one prior to each ward of the city, with a change in the title to signoria. These were to be elected every two months. The system, aristocratic in respect of its small governing body, yet by its elective method lent itself peculiarly to the new bourgeois tendencies; and thenceforward, says Machiavelli, we find the parties of Guelph and Ghibelline in Florence supplanted by the simpler enmity of rich and poor. Soon many of the nobles, albeit Guelph, were driven out of the city, or declared disqualified for priorship on the score of their past disorders; and outside they set up new feuds.

While Florence thus held out, other cities sought safety in one-man-power, choosing some noble as "captain of the people" and setting him above the magistrates. Thus Pagano della Torre, a Guelph, became war-lord of Milan, and his brothers succeeded him, till the office came to be looked on as hereditary, and other cities inclined to choose the same head. And so astutely egotistic was the action of all the forces concerned, that when the Guelph house of Della Torre thus became unmanageably powerful, the Papacy did not scruple to appoint to the archbishopric of Milan an exiled Ghibelline, Visconti. "Henceforward," says Sismondi, "the rivalry between the families of Della Torre and Visconti made that between the people and the nobles almost forgotten." The Visconti finally defeated the other faction, made Milan Ghibelline, and became its virtual rulers.

On the other hand, the entrance of a French army under Charles of Anjou, called in by a French pope to conquer the Ghibelline realm of the Two Sicilies (1266), put a due share of wrong to the account of the Guelphs, the French power standing for something very like barbarism. Its first achievement was to exterminate the Saracen name and religion in Sicily. On its heels came a new irruption from Germany, in the person of Conradin, the claimant of the imperial succession, to whom joined themselves Pisa and Siena, in opposition to their big neighbour and enemy Florence, and the people of Rome itself, at quarrel with their Pope, who had left the city for Viterbo. By Conradin's defeat the French power became paramount; and then it was that the next pope, Gregory X, sought to restore the Ghibellines as counterpoise: a policy pursued by his successor, to the end, however, of substituting (1278) papal for imperial claims over Italy. Even Florence at his wish recalled her Ghibellines. But then came the forced election of another French pope, who acted wholly in the French interest, and re-exiled everywhere the Ghibellines: a process speedily followed in turn by the "Sicilian Vespers," involving the massacre and expulsion of the French, and introducing a Spanish king as representative of the imperial line. Again the Papacy encouraged the other power, relieving Charles II, as King of Naples, from his treaty oath, and set him upon making a war with Sicily, which dragged for twenty-four years. Such were the main political features of the Italy of Dante. The Papacy, becoming a prize of the leading Roman families, played a varying game as between the two monarchies of the south and their partisans in the north; and the minor cities, like the greater, underwent chronic revolutions. Still, so abundant was the Italian outflow of intellectual and inventive energy, so substantial was the general freedom of the cities, and so soundly was the average regimen founded on energetic agriculture and commerce, that wealth abounded on all hands.

With the new French invasion (1302) under Charles of Valois, called in by Boniface VIII to aid him against Sicily, a partially new stage begins. Charles was received at Florence as the typical Guelph; but, being counselled by the pope to pacify Tuscany to his own advantage, allied himself with the ultra-Guelphs, the Neri, gave up to plunder, the proceeds of which he pocketed, the houses of the other or pro-Ghibelline faction, the Bianchi, and enforced the execution or exile of its leading men, including Dante. Then came the election of a strictly French pope and his establishment at Avignon. A new lease being now given to faction, the cities rapidly lapsed into the over-lord system as the only means of preserving order; and when in 1316 a new emperor, Henry VII, presented himself for homage and claimed to place an imperial vicar in each city, most were well disposed to agree. When however Henry, like Charles, showed himself mainly bent on plunder, demanding 100,000 florins from Milan and 60,000 from Genoa, he destroyed his prestige. He had insisted on the recall of all exiles of either party; but all united against his demands, save the Pisans, who had sent him 60,000 florins in advance. His sudden death, on his way to fight the forces of Naples, left everything in a new suspense, save that Pisa, already shorn of maritime power, was soon eclipsed, after setting up a military tyranny as a last resort.